run, run, run
by irishais
Summary: After thirty years, she should move on. Xu/Quistis, and the unkind pull of time.


**run, run, run**

- _irishais-_

Thirty years is a long time, no matter who you are, but it's a hell of a long time when you're a SeeD. Most of their ranks don't even live that long, dead at twenty-five, expiration date reached on a battlefield somewhere.

She was twenty-five during the war, and knew, _knew_ she would die at any moment, knew that her time was coming, that this would be it, and afterward, when she hadn't (but so many others _did_ ), Xu spent the next five years afraid that death would realize its mistake and come back to get her.

It hadn't. She'd relaxed. Orchestrated more missions, sent more SeeDs to die, put the body count between her and Death higher and higher so that he'd _forget_ about her entirely. For a while, it seemed to work.

She'd gotten married, when Quistis had vanished, retired without so much as a _see you late_ to Garden as a whole; a Turk, a hulking man in a black suit who was so wildly different from the only person Xu had ever really _loved_ that it seemed appropriate.

Married six years, divorced in year seven, and the last twenty-three spent behind a desk in Balamb while their son grew up, off at college in Galbadia, and Xu pretends that the whole reason she's in Deling City today is to see him.

That's something normal, right? A surprise visit to your only child?

She still hasn't quite gotten a handle on _normalcy_ , but her life has been anything but. Her train gets in too late to stop by the university campus, but there's a nice jazz bar down the street she'd frequented in her youth, she and Quistis, and maybe it's just nostalgia, maybe she's just old and bitter and angry, even thirty years later.

How _dare_ she? How dare she take two decades of friendship and strip everything away, leave Xu fragile and broken and then titanium invulnerability where her heart once was?

The occasional phone call, cards exchanged for birthdays and holidays, once, a memorable winter solstice visit, over too quickly. At that point, a decade between them had honed an edge to Quistis, battlefield skills transferred to politics, her voice always tiinged with the faintest Galbadian accent whenever she spoke now bearing the full weight of it.

(Xu never really watched television, besides the news, but she made more of a concentrated effort after Quistis left, wondering if she'd ever catch a glimpse. Her husband called it a torch, a cruelty, to leave her lingering like this. He called her a bitch, for wanting this thing that she couldn't have. He wasn't wrong.)

She'd left him, two years later. He hadn't contested any of it, split custody of Tobias right down the middle, six months in Midgar, six in Balamb, alternate holidays, right up until four years later, when he'd gotten himself blown up, and she'd sat on the sofa in her sleek, elegant townhouse and felt nothing.

Life is an unkind thing, but it can be merciful. At least, afterward, she had stopped feeling anything at all.

She slides into a corner booth, tucking her skirt beneath her, and orders a gin and tonic with a twist of lime. There's a pianist on the stage, his voice like smoke-edged silk, and she loses herself in her drink for a long while, until it's nothing left but her stirring around a couple of ice cubes with a tiny straw, green rind tangling up around it.

A second one is slid in front of her. She doesn't remember ordering it, and when she looks up to protest, she expects a guy who wants little more than a night that will be less than memorable to either of them (she still looks thirty-five, even with a scar running beneath her eye, but that's Estharian genetics for you), or an overattentive waitress seeking tips that are coming too slowly tonight.

She does not expect Quistis, and for a solid minute, Xu can't find words, all evaporated from her tongue.

(she is as radiant as starlight on ice, blonde hair cut to her chin and eyes piercing blue. age looks good on her; quistis has met fifty with grace and charm and cheekbones that xu has always envied).

"Hi. Mind if I sit?"

That is thirty years' ice cleaved apart with fluent Galbadian, and Xu reaches, takes the fresh drink, knocks back half of it before she answers, and when she does, it's to slide out of her own seat, stand, reach, touch Quistis' face, run her fingers through that cropped elegantly short hair.

To grab her shoulders and shake her, when all Xu wants to do is deck her with a fist still powerful as iron wrapped in satin skin.

" _Where have you been_?" she demands, and the break in her voice undoes the wall around her heart.

* * *

She is beautiful like a snake is beautiful, death wrapped in loveliness and expensively tailored clothing. Xu hasn't changed, save a scar that runs savage beneath one eye and is probably the reason for the slim glasses that sit on her nose now (irony, Quistis giving up magic and Garden and getting laser surgery, her vision twenty-twenty as Xu's fails). Xu hasn't changed, in the way the anger narrows her gaze and threads down through the fingers gripping at the sleeves of Quistis' coat.

She hadn't planned this. Hadn't wanted her evening to go like this, pursuit of a quiet drink in a bar she liked turned into running headlong into a past she'd wanted to leave on its shelf.

But you can't run from a past as thoroughly entangled as theirs, and Quistis should know that by now, Garden dogging her every step away.

"I'm sorry," she breathes, arms coming up around Xu's back, fingers slipping along the satin blouse, holding fast, Xu tiny like a merciless bird in her arms. "I'm so sorry."

It is not enough. It will never be enough.

The bar is left behind them, a handful of gil left on the table, and they do not touch again until they are safely locked behind a hotel room door, and then it is with trembling hands, implausibility in every brush of finger against skin. Quistis is softer than she was, but politics do not leave much room for mercenary warfare training. Xu is hard muscles and subtle curves wrapped up in pretty lingerie, and Quistis sits back on her heels just to _look_ at her.

It's been thirty years too long, in the way that Xu's palms run up her sides, a question in her eyes.

"What?"

"-Nothing," and she bows her head again, finds Xu's pulse beating frantically, a hummingbird trapped in her throat.

It's been thirty years too long.

Time is a cruel mistress, and they make it go away in the hours between dusk and dawn, banish it to the outside world. Time is for other people. Here, it is Xu's whimper, Quistis' breathless moan, here it is finding fresh scars with her fingertips and planning to ask about them _later_ , here it is her mouth along Xu's cheek, over the ugly scar that makeup can't hide entirely. A fight, Quistis learns, in breathless short sentences, a skirmish in an outer Galbadian province. It is the story of a mercenary, and Xu's body reads like a book.

She lets her hand linger across a soft scar along Xu's stomach, and doesn't have to ask. She knows about Tobias, knows Xu was married- hard not to, when the commander of Balamb Garden marries a Turk. But Xu's skin is warm here, thighs pulling apart as Quistis' hand slips lower. It's been hours. She doesn't know what time it is. Neither of them really care.

"I missed you so much," she says into the hollow of Xu's throat, and it's an admission that she never thought she would make- cut ties, leave Garden behind. Run, run, run, away from death and bloodshed and war and the cruelty it bred in people she thought she knew.

Xu makes a noise of agreement, and pulls Quistis' face up, finds her lips with her own.

(run, run, run, because if you run, the witch can't get you.)


End file.
